Platonic heads into the home stretch this week as the Apple TV+ comedy about two friends who interrupt each other’s lives and relationships digs into jealousy.
Charlie takes his anger out on a co-worker in the strangest way imaginable. Sylvia takes out her anger directly on Charlie. And Will takes out his anger on his co-workers, who in turn take out their frustration on him. It’s less of a listening and learning week than a wit’s end week on this very easily consumed show.
Platonic recap: ‘Slumber Party’
Season 1, episode 9: Charlie (played by Luke Macfarlane) has still not forgiven his wife Sylvia (Rose Byrne) for telling Will (Seth Rogen) secrets she doesn’t tell him, spending time with Will she doesn’t spend with the family, and in general behaving conspiratorially with her best friend. In fact, Charlie is in a huff about it. So he’s acting out the only way he knows how: by working too late with Stewart (Guy Branum) and Vanessa (Janet Varney).
Stewart leaves early, so Charlie and Vanessa hang out late getting drunk. Then the dancing starts, and it almost turns into sex (very awkward sex: points to Janet Varney for committing to the goony earnestness of Vanessa). Charlie goes home and confesses it all to Sylvia, who doesn’t react well.
He says he probably did it because he’s mad about the Will situation, which makes Sylvia even more mad. Charlie works overtime to apologize for his behavior, but she’s not moved.
Kombucha and complications
Will’s having his own problems at work. He wants to be cut in on Omar (Vinny Thomas), Andy (Tre Hale) and Reggie’s (Andrew Lopez) hard kombucha line, but they don’t want him anywhere near it. He didn’t help them do it, but he sees their success as having built on the infrastructure he set up. So Will goes on strike. He thinks they’ll come around, as he tells Sylvia when he invites himself over later.
Charlie comes home and finds Sylvia in no particular mood to parent. She sends him for pizza, then makes him take care of their kids, Frances (Sophie Leonard), Simon (Max Matenko) and Maeve (Sophia Kopera), as well as three neighbor kids.
Finding himself taking care of six kids, plus his angry wife and her lazy friend, isn’t Charlie’s idea of fun, least of all when Sylvia suggests Will sleep over. She spends the night on the couch while Will sleeps on an air mattress in the living room. Charlie hates the situation. And he hates it even more when she suggests that Will turn their garage into a guest room (presumably where he’ll sleep) — and that the pair spend the whole next day together.
Sylvia isn’t ready to forgive Charlie, but she might have to if she keeps pushing him.
I’m never leaving
Later, Will asks Charlie for advice on how best to deal with the situation at his bar. Charlie suggests he try working on Andy, Omar and Reggie separately. Will goes to talk to Andy, who lets it slip that his fiancé Katie (Carla Gallo) knows about the Charlie and Vanessa situation. Will talks to Sylvia about it, curious to know why she didn’t confide in him about it.
When they go to check out the garage, they find a raccoon inside. It jumps on Will and he accidentally knocks out a support beam trying to get the critter off him, ruining the garage. Charlie, furious, finally demands that Sylvia hash out their differences. They work it out and make up, and she finally admits that Will isn’t more important to her than her family.
Will leaves before the conversation happens because he doesn’t want to be a third wheel. (Plus, the fact that Sylvia is hiding things from him means she’s just not in a good place.) He goes back to the bar to discuss the kombucha business idea and finds himself in the middle of an ambush. The guys hired a lawyer and ask Will to take a step back from the business because his instincts all run counter to their goal of making money.
Will handles it poorly and insists he’ll never leave the bar. It is his beer that they’re selling, after all. If they want him to leave, they’re going to need a sturdier plan to make it happen.
This can’t be happening
Photo: Apple TV+
The bar drama isn’t terribly interesting, I must confess, because Rogen’s Will is such a Teflon character construction that you don’t really buy that anything that bad can happen to him. Platonic may be about his reckoning with being a single man after 40, but it’s not about to become a Cassavetes movie, either.
The troubles here need to be the kind of thing a sitcom can reasonably tackle without spoiling the good vibes of the show. Thus Platonic is a more honest show than Shrinking, the Apple TV+ comedy starring Jason Segel and Harrison Ford. That show was ill-equipped from the start to handle something as powerful as grief with such a lightweight writing style. It’s like attacking a bear with a Live, Laugh, Love pillow.
Platonic basically knows exactly what it’s doing, even if it betrays itself to a degree by introducing slightly higher stakes. Nevertheless, this has been a breeze to watch, so I’m all for a second season.
★★★★☆
Watch Platonic on Apple TV+
New episodes of Platonic arrive Wednesdays on Apple TV+.
Rated: TV-MA
Watch on: Apple TV+
Scout Tafoya is a film and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Nylon Magazine. He is the author of Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper and But God Made Him A Poet: Watching John Ford in the 21st Century, the director of 25 feature films, and the director and editor of more than 300 video essays, which can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.
